Main menu

Category Archives: Room Control Panel

The Form Letters page of your room control panel allows the room administrator to create letters and then email them to some or all of the room users listed on your User Accounts page. When you first go to your Form Letters page, you will see a message informing you that an outgoing mail server needs to be configured:

Click on the button next to “Outgoing Mail Server” to configure your outgoing mail server settings. The “Update” button at the bottom of the page must be clicked to save any changes made.

From: The email address that you will be sending your form letters from.

Password: The password configured on your SMTP server.

SMTP Server: Your outgoing mail server name.

Bcc: If enabled, you will receive a copy of all form letters sent without notifying the recipients.

We recommend that after changing any outgoing mail server settings that you click on the button “Update and Test” to verify that the outgoing mail server is properly configured. If you see the statement “Test message sent” and receive the confirmation “Test Email” at the email address configured in your outgoing mail server settings, then your settings are configured correctly.

To create a new form letter, click on the “New Letter” button. iVocalize will automatically create a “Web Conference Account” form letter which contains login information for your web conference room. To change the subject and content of the form letter, click on “Edit” to the right of the form letter’s title. The “Update” button at the bottom of the page must be clicked to save any changes made.

Subject: The form letter description that will appear in the subject line of the email.

Charset: A drop-down selector for choosing the character encoding that you want for your letter.

HTML: Enable “Body is HTML” if you want to include HTML formatting in the body of your letter.

Body: The contents of your letter.

To send a form letter, click “Send” to the right of the form letter that you wish to send.

Select who you want to receive the form letter, and then click the “Send” button on the bottom of the page to email the form letter to everyone you selected.

This section of the room control panel allows the room administrator to determine the availability of video and/or the video quality. There are two quality settings, one for moderators and one for ordinary users. It is possible to enable video for moderators, while leaving it disabled for non-moderators.

Video is shown only for the person currently speaking, provided that they have a webcam installed. This means that the speaker must have sufficient upstream bandwidth capacity for both the audio and video.

Although high quality video can greatly enhance a presentation, enabling video could have the opposite effect if the presenter/speaker has insufficient upstream capacity. Therefore it is important to test the video settings with the people who will be doing the presenting.

The Whiteboard page of your room control panel allows the room administrator to set the default level of user access to your conference room’s integraged whiteboard. The “Update” button at the bottom of the page must be clicked to save any changes made.

Enabled – moderators only: The whiteboard feature is enabled. Moderators control the whiteboard and non-moderators see the whiteboard as read-only. Within the iVocalize application, moderators may grant whiteboard privileges individually to non-moderators by right-clicking on a non-moderator’s user name.

Enabled – users may draw: The whiteboard feature is enabled. Moderators have full control, and non-moderators may draw on the board.

Enabled – users may draw and clear: The whiteboard feature is enabled. Moderators have full control, and non-moderators may draw on the board and clear all annotations from the background image.

Enabled – users may draw, clear and upload…: The whiteboard feature is enabled. Both moderators and non-moderators have full control of the whiteboard, including uploading of new background images and PowerPoint slideshows.

The Locking page of your room control panel controls how and when non-moderators may enter the room:

Settings exist for manual locking of the room in addition to various levels of automatic locking.

Lock the conference room

This is the manual lock setting. When enabled, only moderators may enter the conference room. Users attempting to enter a locked room will receive a message that the room is locked:

The manual lock setting can also be adjusted from the Moderator menu while inside the conference room. Moderators can use the manual lock feature as a quick way to ensure privacy. The manual lock setting does not prevent Moderators from entering the room. To prevent logins during non-meeting hours, see the Auto-Lock setting below.

Automatic Lock Settings

No automatic muting or locking: Disable automatic muting and locking of the room. Users can log in at any time, whether or not a moderator is present, and they will be able to use the microphone and text chat features.

Auto-Mute: Users logging in when no moderator is present will be automatically text-muted and audio-muted.

Auto-Lock: Prevent Users from entering the room when no Moderator is present. Users would receive the Room Locked message shown above.

Auto-Lock + Moderator Approval: In addition to the Auto-Lock setting above, User logins under * (any name) accounts will be delayed until a moderator explicitly approves each one.

When Auto-Lock + Moderator Approval is enabled, the moderator sees the window below for each star-account login. Here, the moderator is being prompted to Accept or Reject Deborah’s login attempt:

While the user is waiting for moderator approval, she sees the following Waiting for Moderator Approval… message:

The Recording page of your room control panel allows the room administrator to control the ability of room users to record a web presentation. The “Update” button at the bottom of the page must be clicked to save any changes made.

The options for Recording are:

Disabled: The presentation recording feature is disabled for all participants.

Enabled – moderators only: The presentation recording feature is enabled for moderators, but disabled for non-moderators.

Enabled – everyone: The presentation recording feature is enabled for both moderators and non-moderators.

The Appearance page of your room control panel allows the room administrator to customize the look of your room and login page. The “Update” button at the bottom of the page must be clicked to save any changes made.

Title: The text appearing as the title of both the iVocalize application and your login page.

Login Prompt: The text appearing on the login button of your login page.

Home URL: The web address that the embedded browser navigates to when a user first enters your conference room.

Help URL: The web address that the embedded browser navigates to when a user presses “F1″ or chooses “Online Help” from the Help menu.

Logo URL: The web address of a graphic image or small web page that appears in the application window to the right of the volume controls. The logo area is 60 pixels high and of variable width.

Icon URL: The web address of an .ICO file that will be used as your application icon. Leave this blank for the default icon.

Browser on: Select whether the embedded web browser appears on the right side of the application window or in the top portion of the application window.

Browser Window Size: The size of the embedded browser (and whiteboard) as a percentage of the main application window. Use 0% to hide the browser (and whiteboard) or 100% for a full screen browser (and whiteboard).

Text Chat Window Size: The size of the text chat window as a percentage of the area shared by the text display and the user display. Use 0% to hide the text chat or 100% to hide the user display.

Color Scheme: The colors of the main application, comprised of a Background Color and an Accent Color.

Background Color: The application window background color. To set this value, first click on Background, then click a color on the color chart. For best results, we recommend that you use a light color as the background.Accent Color: The color of borders and dividing lines in the application. To set this value, first click on Accent Color, then click a color on the color chart. For best results, we recommend that you use a dark color for accents.

Login Page Header: HTML to be placed at the top of your login web page. Your login web page already contains header and body elements, and your HTML is placed inside of the body. Therefore, your HTML should not contain HEAD or BODY elements. For example:

<H1>John Smith's Web Conference Room</H1>

Login Page Footer: HTML to be placed at the bottom of your login web page. For example:

<p>visit us online at www.smithenterprises.com</p>

Welcome Message: A text message displayed to users entering your conference room. The value %NAME% is replaced with the user’s login name. This can have a maximum length of 255 characters.

Launch Test: Test the launching of the iVocalize application (Windows platforms only) with the current settings for Color Scheme and Window Size. This enables you to quickly try out color combinations and window layouts without first saving the changes.

Login Page: Open your login page in a new browser window using the settings that were most recently saved. This allows you to inspect the Header and Footer of your login page.

The Features page of your room control panel allows the room administrator to configure room options and appearance customizations. The “Update” button at the bottom of the page must be clicked to save any changes made.

Talk Timer: The number of seconds that a non-moderator may keep the microphone before it is passed to the next waiting room user. The user status display in iVocalize shows all participants a countdown timer when fewer than 100 seconds remain on the current speaker’s clock. A setting of zero seconds disables the talk timer.

Geo-Location: Display a user’s City, State and Country as a tooltip inside of iVocalize, and on your login and activity pages.

Text Log: Record public text messages in a searchable archive. The text log is accessed in the Browser menu of the iVocalize application.

Allow web browsing…: Allow non-moderators to independently navigate their embedded browsers. Moderators may still send web pages to the room when this is turned off.

Allow private text…: Allow non-moderators to initiate private text messages to other room users. When turned off, moderators may still send private messages to users, and users can respond to moderators.

Show active users…: Display a list of the users currently in your room on your room’s login page.

Enable emoticons…: Enable the conversion of emoticon text character combinations into graphical emoticons, as well as the selection of graphical emoticons from the emoticon library for insertion into the text chat.

Enable Live Screencasting: Enable the screencasting feature. The screencasting button is shown on the whiteboard toolbar, and is available for any user who has whiteboard “Upload” permissions.

Show guest list…: Enable the display of the participants list for non-moderators. If this is turned off, guests can see the moderators in the room, but not the other participants. Turning this off also prevents non-moderators from seeing the participant count in the status bar and from private messaging other guests.

The Banning page lists all users who have been banned from your conference room, and the date and time of their banishment.

By clicking Unban, an administrator may restore access to the conference room from the banned computer. The unban process does not restore a deleted user account.

Baning a user records the hardware signature of the computer from which the user signed in, and prevents future connections from computers with the same hardware id. If the user was signed in under an individual account (as opposed to a star-account) then that user account is also deleted when the user is banned.

Banning is not 100% reliable since the hardware signature of a computer may change as the result of new hardware, or the unwanted user may sign in from a different computer. It is also possible that multiple computers will have the same hardware signature, potentially blocking innocent users along with the banished user.

If a user receives error 86 and that user’s name does not appear on the ban list, it may be that a different user with the same hardware signature has been banned, preventing the legitimate user from entering. In this case, the only recourse is to remove ban entries from the room until the legitimate user is able to enter. If the time is known when the legitimate user became unable to access the room, then begin removing ban entries from before that time.

The Login History section of the room control panel shows who has logged into the room and when.

Records appear here once a user has logged out. While still logged in, users appear on the Online Now page.

From the Login History page, it is possible to look back in time and to ban a user who has previously caused trouble in your conference room. Banning a user actually bans the computer that the user connected from and deletes the user from your User Accounts page. (Note: * (any user) accounts are not deleted.) From that moment onward, no user can log into your conference room from the computer that was banned.

Login History shows the following information:

Name – The screen name of the participent

Address – The IP address and location of the participant

Enter – The time of login

Leave – The time of logout. If a participant has an unreliable or over-utilized internet connection, there may be multiple login history entries of short duration as the software automatically reconnects the participant.

Version – The software version and operating system of the particpant

Actions/Ban – Clicking Ban on any login history entry will ban the parcipants computer from future logins, and delete the user account if it is not a star-account. This action will also remove any login history entries made from the same computer.

iVocalize includes an automated registration system to facilitate the signup of new users to your conference room.

As mentioned previously, the default setting for new rooms includes two star-accounts, which allow login under any user name. By contrast, the registration system creates individually named accounts and passwords. Individual user names and passwords are much more secure, since a person cannot login unless they have a specific user account and password.

The registration system has three settings:

Disabled – manual registration. The room operates using star-accounts and manual configuration. The administrator can decide whether or not to create individual accounts manually or using the bulk import feature, and whether to use star-accounts.

Enabled – email confirmation only. Users attempting to register are sent a confirmation email where they must click a link in order to validate their email address.

Enabled – email confirmation and owner approval. Users attempting to register are sent a confirmation email. Following confirmation, the registration request is held for approval by the room owner.

When the registration system is turned on, any star-accounts are immediately removed, and a New User link appears on the room’s login page:

Clicking on the New User link brings up a registration form:

Completing the registration form sends an email to the user for confirmation. Important: The confirmation email is sent from you,the account owner, and requires that you have configured the Outgoing Mail Server under Form Letters. iVocalize does not send any email on your behalf, however, the registration does send registration emails from the account that you have configured.

Here is an example of the confirmation email sent to the new registrant. Note: The confirmation and new user emails are not currently customizable, however, this is a planned enhancement.

Upon confirmation, if registration is configured for email confirmation only, then the new user account is immediately created and login details sent to the new user. In addition, a new user notification is sent to the room owner.

If registration is configured for owner approval, then the registration is placed on hold and the registration request sent to the room owner to approve or decline. The owner can approve or decline via email, or visit the Registration section of the room control panel to see a complete list of all pending registrations:

The User Accounts section of the room control panel lists each of the accounts configured in your web conference room.

Find – In rooms with many user accounts, the Find feature enables an administrator to filter the list of displayed accounts. To use this feature, enter the first few characters of the user name into the find window and press Enter. To restore the complete list of accounts, clear the search box and press Enter again.

New User – This button brings up the user account editing form to create a new account. This form is covered in detail below.

Import – Clicking this button brings up the Bulk Import form where many lines containing Name/Email/Password can be pasted in at one time.

Export – Clicking this button brings up the Bulk Export form where all accounts are listed at once as lines containing Name/Email/Password for export into other systems or saved into a comma delimited text file.

Delete All – Clicking this button removes all user accounts. Following this operation, it is not possible to enter the room until at least one new account has been created. Room owners sometimes populate the account database using the bulk import for special events then remove all accounts once the event has completed.

Name – The login name for this user. * (Any Name) means that this is a star-account and can be used to log in with any screen name provided that the password is known.

Email – The user’s email address for receiving communication that is sent via the Form Letters page of your room control panel.

Logins – The total number of logins completed under this user account.

Status – The privilege level of the user account, Expired or Disabled.

Actions/Edit – Click this link to change the details of the user account such as password, privilege level, expiration date or mute setting. This form is covered in detail below.

Actions/Del – Delete this user account. Deleting a user account boots anyone currently connected under the account, then removes the account any any associated login history.

Actions/Email – Send a form letter to this user. The Email action is available only when an email address is configured on the account, and when the Form Letters section of the control panel has been properly set up. See the Form Letters topic for further information.

After clicking New User, the new user form appears.

Name – Enter the login name for this user, or a single asterisk * to create a * (Any Name) account. By default, new conference rooms are configured with two * (Any Name) accounts, called star-accounts, one for Moderators (with a password) and another for ordinary users (with no password). Star-accounts are very easy to use because guests can sign in under their own names and, in the case of a no-password star-account, do not have to remember any login information. However, star-accounts also represent the least secure room configuration because one password is shared by many people. Therefore, the use of individual user names is highly recommended. User names are not case-sensitive.

Password – The password for this user account. Passwords are case sensitive. In cases where multiple accounts have the same login name, as with multiple * (any user) accounts, the password used determines which account a user actually logs into and the resulting privilege level that user receives.

Email – The user’s email address for receiving communication that is sent via the Form Letters page of your room control panel.

Expires – The expiration date for this user account. Leave this field blank for no expiration date.

Privilege – The privilege level of this account: User, Moderator or Administrator. Moderators can control the talk queue, present with synchronized browsing or the integrated whiteboard, and mute or unmute users. Administrators have all the rights of moderators, with the additional ability to ban users from within the iVocalize application.

Enabled – Enable or disable the user account.

Mute – The mute settings determine whether and how this user will be muted upon login. It is also possible to mute and unmute individual users from within the conference room. When someone is muted inside the conference room, the setting is reflected here in the control panel. Note that mute settings apply only to User accounts. Moderators and administrators cannot be muted.

After clicking on the Edit action beside a user name, the Edit user form appears.

All fields are the same as on the New User form, except that the Name field cannot be changed once an account has been created.

The Online Now section of the room control panel shows the names and locations of people currently logged into your conference room:

Name – The screen name that the participant signed in with. If your room is configured with * (Any Name) accounts, this corresponds to whatever the particpant entered on the login page. If your room is configured with individual user names and passwords, then the name will exactly match one of your configured user accounts.

Address – This contains the IP address and an approximate City, State and Country based on a reverse lookup of the IP address. The Geolocation information is an approximation only and is not guaranteed to be accurate. In particular, guests connecting through proxy servers will appear to be signing in from wherever the proxy server is located.

Version – This is the iVocalize software version and operating system that the participant is running. This information is useful for troubleshooting purposes.

Time – The number of hours and minutes that this user has been connected.

Actions/Boot – Temporarily eject someone from the conference room. An administrator can force a guest from the room for many different reasons, including misbehavior, signing in with an inappropriate name, etc. A user who has been booted may immediately sign back in, provided that they have a valid user name and password.

Actions/Ban – Eject someone from the conference room, delete their user account, and attempt to prevent future logins from the same computer. Baning a user records the hardware signature of the computer from which the user signed in, and prevents future connections from computers with the same hardware id. If the user was signed in under an individual account (as opposed to a star-account) then that user account is deleted, preventing future logins. Banning is not 100% reliable since the hardware signature of a computer may change as the result of new hardware, or the unwanted user may sign in from a different computer. It is also possible that multiple computers will have the same hardware signature, potentially blocking innocent users along with the banished user.

The Home section of the room control panel contains contact information for the registered account holder and several important hyperlinks:

Room ID – This number uniquely identifies your conference room. Include it in all correspondence with iVocalize.

Capacity – The maximum number of people who can be in your room at one time

Peak Connection – The maximum number of people who have been in your room simultaneously

User Accounts – The number of accounts configured under the User Accounts section of your control panel. New rooms come with two accounts pre-configured, one for Moderators, and one for ordinary users.

Login Page – This is the main login page where people go to enter your conference room. Everyone can sign in here, whether Moderator or ordinary user. This login page requests both a user name and a password, however, a password may not be needed depending on how your room is configured. Include this URL in all correspondence with iVocalize.

No Password Login page – This is a version of your main login page that does not request a password. This link will only be valid if your room is configured to allow logins without a password. This link can be distributed to guests if you are running an open conference room with no password required, and you want to make it as simple as possible for your guests to participate.

Direct Launch – This link bypasses the login page and directly launches iVocalize for login to your room. The application will still request a user name and password, however, it is possible to add &user= and &pass= parameters to the link so that the user is not prompted for this information.

Activity Page – This is a simple web page showing the names of people currently logged into your room, suitable for embedding on another website.

Registration Page – This is a web page where people can sign up for a new user account in your conference room. This link is available only when the automatic registration system is turned on in your room.